HMRC Self Assessment APIs – Experiences and Developments

As our practitioner customers will be aware, in the latter half of 2017, we released our implementation of HMRC’s new Application Programming Interfaces (or APIs). This is data that HMRC has already received from different sources which can then be fed into the tax return. This facility has proven to be extremely useful, saving our customers a great deal of time and effort.

HMRC SA APIs. AOK?

Great news. TaxCalc now incorporates the ability to receive data directly from HMRC using HMRC’s pre-population APIs.

Once you’ve checked the data, all you have to do is click a single button and the data is fed directly into TaxCalc Tax Return Production to generate a tax return. This should save you considerable time and effort.

Pre-population of Self Assessment Tax Returns Using HMRC APIs

As you may have heard in recent announcements, such as the one from our CEO Tracy Ebdon Poole Making Tax Digital for Business has been delayed. However, the ability for information to be automatically populated in a Self Assessment tax return is still pressing on. 

Having first written about this in early 2016, we thought it was time to update our customers as to the progress of this.

Making Tax Digital - Consultation Documents

HMRC have now published their consultation documents on the Making Tax Digital (MTD) strategy. Covering six separate documents and totalling 243 pages, together they set out HMRC’s vision for the future for the UK’s tax system.

For some time now, we’ve been taking time to inform our customers of the key concepts behind Making Tax Digital: Digital Tax Accounts, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Quarterly Updates. The consultations not only help explain these plans but introduce some new ideas not previously imagined.

We’ve dissected the first of the six documents and here are our high-level findings…

New Addition to HMRC Government Gateway Security

As part of HMRC’s Making Tax Digital strategy, we have been expecting security improvements to be made to taxpayers’ access to their online accounts via the Government Gateway.

On 29 March 2016, HMRC introduced a new optional layer of security that introduces a mobile phone into the logging in process for Individual taxpayers…

Behind the Scenes of Working with Government

Just before Christmas, there was a lot of discussion on AccountingWeb regarding quarterly reporting and the notion of there being a petition set up to challenge the strategy as announced in the Autumn Statement.

As an apolitical organisation, we won’t be drawn into whether quarterly reporting is a good idea or not but with 229 comments (at time of writing) on this particular thread, it’s clearly proven to be a fiercely debated topic.

One of the comments that caught my eye during the debate was a call for the Big Four firms and accountancy bodies to use their influence with HMRC.

This gave me two thoughts…

The Digital Tax Account Explained

Back in the March Budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced that the tax return would be replaced by a Digital Tax Account by the end of this parliament. As is often the case with Government policy, such broad statements don’t have any immediate substance to them apart from a few broad concepts.

Over the six months that have followed, HMRC have been beavering away at working out what a Digital Tax Account should look like and how it should work. We have been fortunate to be part of this and have helped to shape this development.

Bit by bit, the picture of how the Digital Tax Account will work has become increasingly more clear and now we can finally begin to explain how some of this will work.